OLIVER HOLT

10th August 1909 – 5th December 1997

Oliver Holt has been a concealed artist although the many individuals who came into contact with him treasure his work. Unlike his contemporary Francis Bacon most of his work was kept out of the public sphere and crafted without sensationalism or ambiguity. Save important but unassuming creative leaps forward, such as his Twelve Days of Christmas, the first published version to include representations of all twelve gifts, Oliver Holt relied on a network of supporters and admirers. His work was regularly targeted and crafted for an intimate and nuanced audience. In this unique exhibition the Holt gallery has had unprecedented access to work from private collections and items from the artist’s uncatalogued archive, including family photographs, many unpublished and uncollected texts, along with works from across the artists full range of activity: from illustration and graphic works to meticulously realised landscapes and exact natural observations. The exhibition will also present significant items such as the artist’s work-table and studio equipment, kindly lent by the family. These historic artefacts further illuminate aspects of the artists practice and will be complemented by new interview material from the family. A typical Oliver Holt work will be a gift in two parts, conceived as a faithful record of the natural world, with an astutely specific choice of subjects, always selected with characterful warmth and the faintest dash of surrealism. The intensity of his observations are recorded with hypodermic precision as an act of exceptional love and generosity to his spectators. The Holt exhibition at Sherborne will highlight the compassion of this artist. He chose the sharpened pencil as his primary medium; the families’ memories of the artist at work always surround him with the confetti of pencil shavings. The act of stripping away the wooden surround to access the opulent grey marrow focused to a point and the accumulation of the silver graphite deposits that build in the pictures to rich tones, reflect the rising joy and optimism of these numerous fine drawings, as Oliver Holt regards and records and then passes on his intense inspection of the natural world. A celebrated writer and orator, a larger audience are more familiar with his literary work, through the collection Piper’s Hill or his articles for the Times, than with his visual output. Many of the drawings in the exhibition are complemented by extended, and previously unavailable, texts specifying the ties between the images and the specific people for whom they were made. Following the munificent spirit found in Oliver Holt the Holt family have been incredibly generous in their support for this exhibition, allowing access to cherished details of the artist’s family life and working methods. Like the British Surrealist Edward Burra, four years Holt’s senior, an echo of whose work can be found in several of the larger landscapes, his life was private but was given away in his drawing and writing. He was sanguine, life was short, and nature offered the potential for new discoveries every day. His vision rested as abundantly on human nature as it did on the natural world. Close readings of many of the images in the exhibition will yield a sense of an artist captivated by all of life. In an account, published in the Times in 1957, he describes, in pointed detail, the experience of watching his father shaving. His pride in the minute physical facts of this ritual will act as a foretaste for the, impossible to reproduce, attention found in the many works brought together for the first time in the Oliver Holt Gallery. His mouth contorted first to one side then to the other – his head held high while he did the bit under his chin, and his upper lip drawn down while the razor scraped carefully, but perilously, near his nostrils. Then came the part I loved. His left hand was over the top of his head and his right cheek slightly raised, the razor slid, with a fascinating scraping noise, down the right side of his face.